Most of the fellow workers Jorge encounters at Twin Cities construction sites are, like him, undocumented. As they hear President-elect Donald Trump’s vows of mass deportations, they have taken to teasing one another: “It’s time to go.”
“We’re trying to make it seem so that it’s not so difficult or harsh,” Jorge said in an interview. But there is fear underneath the wisecracks. “The majority of people who have families are scared,” he said.
Minnesota’s estimated 81,000 unauthorized immigrants, and the industries that rely on their labor, are bracing for the impact of Trump’s repeated pledges to carry out deportations on an unprecedented scale as soon as he takes office Jan. 20. “I think you have to do it, and it’s a very tough thing to do, but you have rules, regulations, laws,” Trump said recently on NBC. “They came in illegally.”
Unlawful border crossings reached record levels under President Joe Biden. Millions of immigrants were released into the interior of the United States with notices to appear later in immigration court for removal proceedings, contributing to a record court backlog nationally and in Minnesota.
Others, such as Jorge, are not on the court dockets as they are longtime undocumented residents who never turned themselves in at the border. Due to their lack of legal status, Jorge and other migrants agreed to be interviewed on the condition that the Minnesota Star Tribune withhold their surnames.
The Mexican native, 30, has lived in Minnesota without papers for more than a decade, working as a roofer on large houses in upscale suburbs from Wayzata to Edina. From that precarious position, one among the nation’s estimated 1.5 million construction workers, Jorge sees the current rise in migration affecting his own prospects.
Jorge once worked mainly with Mexican and Central American migrants, he said. In recent years, he has been charged on construction sites with training migrants from Ecuador — only to see employers hire those workers instead because they worked for less.
The increased competition has led to a slowdown in work for Jorge. “They are dropping down the wage,” he said. The boss, he added, “would rather pay less money.”